Today in TV History: ‘Saturday Night Live’ Helped New York Bounce Back After 9/11

Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Writing about the events and even the aftermath of the September 11th attacks through the prism of entertainment is always going to be a little dicey, if only because you want to avoid the implication of drawing an equivalence between real-life loss of life or acts of heroism with the circumstances of the entertainers who then responded to it. But in the sense that 9/11 was something that happened to all of us, in one way or another, the ways that the culture at large responded to it are worth noting. It’s that kind of uncertainty that characterized the way that Saturday Night Live approached its first show back after 9/11.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, certain pieces of culture became totems for New York City, some more likely than others. Sex and the City rebranded itself with the “City” in the title taking on greater thematic meaning. The Sopranos also began to cloak itself in post-9/11 smoldering Americana. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee saw their connections to New York galvanized by the public. Hell, The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” became a New York City post-9/11 anthem because it was New York Yankee Paul O’Neill’s at-bat song. But if one television show established itself as New York’s own in the wake of the attacks, it was SNL, and the gravity with which they took the task of bouncing back only underlined that.

The September 29th episode began solemnly, with then-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani appearing on stage with New York Fire Department, Police Department and Port Authority police, the heroes of 9/11, all standing on the SNL stage. After some words reflecting on the tragedy of the attacks, underlining the idea that “we will not live in fear; we choose to live our lives in freedom.” The camera then panned to Paul Simon, another New York City and SNL totem, playing an understated version of “The Boxer.”

But the real SNL kick came when Lorne Michaels joined Giuliani and asked the question that was actually being asked around media circles in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when it seemed like we’d never be able to think about anything else ever again. “Can we be funny?” Michaels asked, a request for permission that was probably only mostly tongue-in-cheek. Giuliani’s response — “why start now?” — was a big fat softball over the middle of the plate, but it was the ice-breaker the show needed to get on with the business of making television and the business of getting on with the rest of our lives.